An Easy Way to Siphon Gas

In 2006, at the North American Spitfire Squadron's Central Spit Together, there was a little incident where one of the member's Spitfire ran out of gas while out on the group drive. Three of us pulled over to see if we could help out. One fella had a really neat collapsible gas can and a siphon hose. A valiant attempt was made to siphon gas out of a Spitfire's gas tank, but he couldn't get any gas out. So we ended up driving down the road to the next gas station to get a couple gallons of gas.

Our inability to siphon gas reminded me of a product that I had seen advertised on TV called a "Flo N' Go"”". The Flo N' Go consists of a gas pump handle with a built-in hand pump, a length of tubing connected to a valve that screws into the top of a gas can and another length of tubing that goes into the gas can. It works by setting the gas can above what you want to fill, open the valve, and squeezing the hand pump 2 to 3 times to start gas flowing and gas continues to flow as long as you keep the pump handle squeezed. To stop the siphon flow of gas you just release the handle. I thought this was pretty neat and I figured that I could easily modify it to siphon gas out of a Spitfire's, or any LBC's gas tank.

What I did was replace the short piece of tubing that is supposed to go into the gas can with a piece of tubing about 3 ft long (a length of tubing I happened to have on hand). I pushed the tubing into my Spitfire's gas tank, which was about ¾ empty at the time, placed a gas can on the ground next to the car and started pumping the Flo N' Go's hand pump. Within seconds I was filling the gas can with gasoline from my Spitfire.

The Flo N' Go delivers about 1 gallon per minute of gas. The Flo N' Go packs up quite small and will be in my Spitfire's boot on the next road trip I take; right next to a 2 gallon gas can.

Article by Mark Jones
2007-12-18